Tales of Men and Ghosts

UP the long hill from the station at St.-Cloud, Lizzie West climbed in the cold spring sunshine.  As she breasted the incline, she noticed the first waves of wistaria over courtyard railings and the high lights of new foliage against the walls of ivy-matted gardens; and she thought again, as she had thought a hundred times before, that she had never seen so beautiful a spring.

She was on her way to the Deerings’ house, in a street near the hilltop; and every step was dear and familiar to her.  She went there five times a week to teach little Juliet Deering, the daughter of Mr. Vincent Deering, the distinguished American artist.  Juliet had been her pupil for two years, and day after day, during that time, Lizzie West had mounted the hill in all weathers; sometimes with her umbrella bent against a driving rain, sometimes with her frail cotton parasol unfurled beneath a fiery sun, sometimes with the snow soaking through her patched boots or a bitter wind piercing her thin jacket, sometimes with the dust whirling about her and bleaching the flowers of the poor little hat that had to “carry her through” till next summer.

At first the ascent had seemed tedious enough, as dull as the trudge to her other lessons.  Lizzie was not a heaven-sent teacher; she had no born zeal for her calling, and though she dealt kindlyand dutifully with her pupils, she did not fly to them on winged feet.  But one day something had happened to change the face of life, and since then the climb to the Deering house had seemed like a dream-flight up a heavenly stairway.

Her heart beat faster as she remembered it—­no longer in a tumult of fright and self-reproach, but softly, peacefully, as ifbrooding over a possession that none could take from her.

It was on a day of the previous October that she had stopped, after Juliet’s lesson, to ask if she might speak to Juliet’s papa.  One had always to apply to Mr. Deering if there was anything to be said about the lessons.  Mrs. Deering lay on her lounge up-stairs, reading greasy relays of dog-eared novels, the choice of which she left to the cook and the nurse, who were always fetching them forher from the cabinet de lecture; and it was understood inthe house that she was not to be “bothered” about Juliet.  Mr. Deering’s interest in his daughter was fitful rather than consecutive; but at least he was approachable, and listened sympathetically, if a little absently, stroking his long, fair mustache, while Lizzie stated her difficulty or put in her plea for maps or copy-books.

“Yes, yes—­of course—­whatever you think right,” he would always assent, sometimes drawing a five-franc piece from his pocket, and laying it carelessly on the table, or oftener saying, with his charming smile:  “Get what you please, and just put it onyour account, you know.”

But this time Lizzie had not come to ask for maps or copy-books, or even to hint, in crimson misery,—­as once, poor soul! she had had to do,—­that Mr. Deering had overlooked her last little account had probably not noticed that she had left it, some two months earlier, on a corner of his littered writing-table.  That hour had been bad enough, though he had done his best to make it easy to carry it off gallantly and gaily; but this was infinitely worse.  For she had come to complain of her pupil; to say that, much as she loved little Juliet, it was useless, unless Mr. Deering could “do something,” to go on with the lessons.

“It wouldn’t be honest—­I should be robbing you; I’m not sure that I haven’t already,” she half laughed, through mounting tears, as she put her case.  Little Juliet would not work, would not obey.  Her poor, little, drifting existence floated aimlessly between the kitchen and the lingerie, and all the groping tendrils ofher curiosity were fastened about the doings of the backstairs.

It was the same kind of curiosity that Mrs. Deering, overhead in her drug-scented room, lavished on her dog-eared novels and onthe “society notes” of the morning paper; but since Juliet’s horizon was not yet wide enough to embrace these loftier objects, her interest was centered in the anecdotes that Celeste and Suzanne brought back from the market and the library.  That these were not always of an edifying nature the child’s artless prattle too often betrayed; but unhappily they occupied her fancy to the complete exclusion of such nourishing items as dates and dynasties, and the sources of the principal European rivers.

At length the crisis became so acute that poor Lizzie felt herself bound to resign her charge or ask Mr. Deering’s intervention; and for Juliet’s sake she chose the harder alternative.  It was hard to speak to him not onlybecause one hated still more to ascribe it to such vulgar causes, but becauseone blushed to bring them to the notice of a spirit engaged with higher things.  Mr. Deering was very busy at that moment:  he had a new picture “on.”  And Lizzie entered the studio with the flutterof one profanely intruding on some sacred rite; she almost heard the rustle of retreating wings as she approached.

And then—­and then—­how differently it had all turned out!  Perhaps it wouldn’t have, if she hadn’t been such a goose—­she who so seldom cried, so prided herself on a stoic control of her little twittering cageful of “feelings.”  But if she had cried, it was because he had looked at her so kindly, so softly, and because she had nevertheless felt him so pained and shamed by what she said.  The pain, of course, lay for both in the implication behind her words—­in the one word they left unspoken.  If little Juliet was as she was, it was because of the mother up-stairs—­the mother who had given her child her futile impulses, and grudged her the care that might have guided them.  The wretched case so obviously revolved in its own vicious circle that when Mr. Deering had murmured, “Of course if my wife were not an invalid,” they both turned with a simultaneous spring to the flagrant “bad example” of Celeste and Suzanne, fastening on that with a mutual insistence that ended inhis crying out, “All the more, then, how can you leave her to them?”

“But if I do her no good?” Lizzie wailed; and it was then that,—­when he took her hand and assured her gently, “But you do, you do!”—­it was then that, in the traditional phrase, she “brokedown,” and her conventional protest quivered off into tears.

“You do me good, at any rate—­you make the houseseem less like a desert,” she heard him say; and the next moment she felt herself drawn to him, and they kissed each other through her weeping.

They kissed each other—­there was the new fact.  One does not, if one is a poor little teacher living in Mme. Clopin’s Pension Suisse at Passy, and if one has pretty brown hair and eyes that reach out trustfully to other eyes—­one does not, under these common but defenseless conditions, arrive at the age of twenty-five without being now and then kissed,—­waylaid once by a noisy student between two doors, surprised once by one’s gray-bearded professoras one bent over the “theme” he was correcting,—­but these episodes, if they tarnish the surface, do not reach the heart:  itis not the kiss endured, but the kiss returned, that lives.  And Lizzie West’s first kiss was for Vincent Deering.

As she drew back from it, something new awoke in her—­something deeper than the fright and the shame, and the penitent thought of Mrs. Deering.  A sleeping germ of life thrilled and unfolded, and started out blindly to seek the sun.

She might have felt differently, perhaps,—­the shame and penitence might have prevailed,—­had she not known him so kind and tender, and guessed him so baffled, poor, and disappointed.  She knew the failure of his married life, and she divined a corresponding failure in his artistic career.  Lizzie, who had made her own faltering snatch at the same laurels, brought her thwarted proficiency to bear on the question of his pictures, which she judged to be extremely brilliant, but suspected of having somehowfailed to affirm their merit publicly.  She understood that he had tasted an earlier moment of success:  a mention, a medal, something official and tangible; then the tide of publicity had somehow setthe other way, and left him stranded in a noble isolation.  It was extraordinary and unbelievable that any one so naturally eminent and exceptional should have been subject to the same vulgar necessities that governed her own life, should have known povertyand obscurity and indifference.  But she gathered that this had been the case, and felt that it formed the miraculous link between them.  For through what medium less revealing than that of sharedmisfortune would he ever have perceived so inconspicuous an object as herself?  And she recalled now how gently his eyes had rested on her from the first—­the gray eyes that might have seemed mocking if they had not been so gentle.

She remembered how he had met her the first day, when Mrs. Deering’s inevitable headache had prevented her from receiving the new teacher, and how his few questions had at once revealed his interest in the little stranded, compatriot, doomed to earn a precarious living so far from her native shore.  Sweet as the moment of unburdening had been, she wondered afterward what had determined it:  how she, so shy and sequestered, had found herselfletting slip her whole poverty-stricken story, even to the avowalof the ineffectual “artistic” tendencies that had drawn her to Paris, and had then left her there to the dry task of tuition.  She wondered at first, but she understood now; she understood everything after he had kissed her.  It was simply because he wasas kind as he was great.

She thought of this now as she mounted the hill in the spring sunshine, and she thought of all that had happened since.  The intervening months, as she looked back at them, were merged in a vast golden haze, through which here and there rose the outline of a shining island.  The haze was the general enveloping sense of his love, and the shining islands were the days they had spent together.  They had never kissed again under his own roof.  Lizzie’s professional honor had a keen edge, but she had been spared the vulgar necessity of making him feel it.  It was of theessence of her fatality that he always “understood” when his failing to do so might have imperiled his hold on her.

But her Thursdays and Sundays were free, and it soon became a habit to give them to him.  She knew, for her peace of mind, onlytoo much about pictures, and galleries and churches had been the one bright outlet from the grayness of her personal atmosphere.  For poetry, too, and the other imaginative forms of literature, she had always felt more than she had hitherto had occasion to betray; and now all these folded sympathies shot out their tendrils to the light.  Mr. Deering knew how to express with unmatched clearness and competence the thoughts that trembled in her mind:  to talk with him was to soar up into the azure on the outspread wings of his intelligence, and look down dizzily yet distinctly, on all the wonders and glories of the world.  She was a little ashamed, sometimes, to find how few definite impressions she brought back from these flights; but that was doubtless because her heart beatso fast when he was near, and his smile made his words like a long quiver of light.  Afterward, in quieter hours, fragments of theirtalk emerged in her memory with wondrous precision, every syllable as minutely chiseled as some of the delicate objects in crystal or ivory that he pointed out in the museums they frequented.  It wasalways a puzzle to Lizzie that some of their hours should be so blurred and others so vivid.

On the morning in question she was reliving all these memories with unusual distinctness, for it was a fortnight since she had seen her friend.  Mrs. Deering, some six weeks previously, had gone to visit a relation at St.-Raphael; and, after she had been a month absent, her husband and the little girl had joined her.  Lizzie’sadieux to Deering had been made on a rainy afternoon in the damp corridors of the Aquarium at the Trocadero.  She could not receive him at her own pension.  That a teacher should bevisited by the father of a pupil, especially when that father wasstill, as Madame Clopin said, si bien, was against that lady’s austere Helvetian code.  From Deering’s first tentative hint of another solution Lizzie had recoiled in a wild unreasoned flurry of all her scruples, he took her “No, no, no!” as he tookall her twists and turns of conscience, with eyes half-tender and half-mocking, and an instant acquiescence which was the finest homage to the “lady” she felt he divined and honored in her.

So they continued to meet in museums and galleries, or to extend, on fine days, their explorations to the suburbs, where now and then, in the solitude of grove or garden, the kiss renewed itself, fleeting, isolated, or prolonged in a shy, silent pressure of the hand.  But on the day of his leave-taking the rain kept them under cover; and as they threaded the subterranean windings of the Aquarium, and Lizzie looked unseeingly at the monstrous faces glaring at her through walls of glass, she felt like a poor drowned wretch at the bottom of the sea, with all her glancing, sunlit memories rolling over her like the waves of its surface.

“You’ll never see him again—­never see him again,” the wavesboomed in her ears through his last words; and when she had said good-by to him at the corner, and had scrambled, wet and shivering, into the Passy omnibus, its great, grinding wheels took up the derisive burden—­“Never see him, never see him again.”

All that was only two weeks ago, and here she was, as happy as a lark, mounting the hill to his door in the spring sunshine.  Soweak a heart did not deserve such a radiant fate; and Lizzie saidto herself that she would never again distrust her star.